White House Plays Chicken With a War Hero

There was a great editorial by Derrick Jackson in the Boston Globe over the weekend in which he talked about the despicable attacks from the Republican party on Representative John Murtha (D-PA). Murtha is the heavily-decorated veteran (Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts in Vietnam) who decided he had enough last week and called for a gradual withdrawal from Iraq to start immediately.

In his column, called White House plays chicken with a war hero, Jackson takes to task, a White House with a lot of tough-guy bluster, but little military service to back it up:

Talk about playing the chicken-hawk card. A White House where most of the architects of war avoided combat in their own lives dared to associate two people who are worlds apart in world views. Moore made the anti-Bush ''Fahrenheit 9/11," which infuriated the right wing by breaking box office records for a documentary film. Moore was booed at the 2004 Republican National Convention.

Murtha is the 73-year-old recipient of two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star for combat duty in Vietnam. He is a Democrat whose three decades in office are marked by support of President Reagan's policies in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Murtha was a top Democratic supporter of the 1991 Gulf War. He wants a constitutional ban on burning the American flag.

In a 2002 press briefing, former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz termed the support of politicians like Murtha for the Pentagon as ''wonderful." In the 2004 vice presidential debate, incumbent Dick Cheney said, ''One of my strongest allies in Congress when I was secretary of defense was Jack Murtha."

You can read the rest here.